Today's beta includes the following newness:
- Fix for table of contents sometimes causing the article to jump around
erratically when selecting a section near the bottom of an article. This
fix incidentally made the TOC animation much more smooth :)
- Networking crash fix.
- More responsive article touch event handling.
- Fix for reference panel sometimes flickering to blank.
- Better table of contents swipe gesture responsiveness.
- Slight increase in size of Nearby item distance label for better
readability.
If you haven't already signed up to the beta program you can do so here:
http://tflig.ht/1dhqz8j
Feel free to share this link too!
Hello everyone!
Automated builds of the Wikipedia app are now available at
http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikipedia-android-builds/
That is a nice little (and barebones) page that simply shows the last
time the app was updated, and also offers a download link. You can
click 'download' and then install the apk that is received.
The app downloaded from this page can also be installed side by side
with the normal and beta apps from the Google Play store, so you can
have all three! :)
Thanks to Dmitry and Bearnd for helping with this.
Coming soon: A small app that'll keep checking for updates and nag you
if there are any...
--
Yuvi Panda T
http://yuvi.in/blog
http://time.com/2946631/best-android-apps-2014/
I'm playing with some of these now a days.
Dmitry/ Bernd - Please do play with these if you have some time.
Specifically good ones are -
Google keep (swipe away notes is nice)
Open table (Background lead Image loading is interesting, clean typography)
Circa News (Clean Layout, nice visual details on the right slider)
Photo Editor By Aviary (Strong workflow right from download)
----
Vibha Bamba
Senior Designer | WMF Design
This week's Beta release of the Android app [1] incorporates the following
new features and updates:
- Rolled up "page issues" boxes into a link that shows them as a popup
dialog.
- Rolled up disambiguation links into a single link that shows them as a
popup list.
- Frequently-used languages are now kept at the top of the list, for easier
selection.
- Improved performance of search auto-completion.
- Improved page loading speed and data usage by using compression in
network requests.
- Using updated versions of Android support libraries
Enjoy! (btw, the Beta app now has just shy of 100K active users!)
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikipedia.beta
-Dmitry
I was just looking at the Mobile Web search functionality, and I noticed
that the drop-down list of search results in Mobile Web is different from
the list in our native apps for the same search term. It looks like Mobile
Web uses prefixsearch, whereas the apps are using opensearch.
I'm curious what was the rationale for using a different API in the apps?
(Wouldn't we want the search results to be consistent between the Apps and
Mobile Web?)
-Dmitry
During Wikimania, me + Kaldari + Sherah did some in-person testing of a
prototype mobile Wikidata game that Sherah built during the hackathon.[1]
I've finally transcribed the notes from the testing sessions & thought it
might be useful/interesting for folks to read through the summary and raw
notes:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Design/Research/Guerilla_testing_Wikigrok.
The tl;dr is that we've definitely got some iterating to do on the UX and
copy to make this a better, more understandable, less intimidating
experience for less experienced/non-Wikipedian users – but it was great to
get that feedback early on so we can act on it before writing any of the
live code :)
Lemme know if you have any questions – and Kaldari + Sherah, feel free to
add anything you remember from the testing :)
1. Check it out for yourself on a phone or iOS emulator: http://wikigrok
-proto.meteor.com/
--
Maryana Pinchuk
Product Manager, Wikimedia Foundation
wikimediafoundation.org
On Sun, 17 Aug 2014, at 10:54, Daniel Friesen wrote:
> On 2014-08-16, 4:56 PM, Yuvi Panda wrote:
> > On Sun, Aug 17, 2014 at 12:40 AM, svetlana <svetlana(a)fastmail.com.au> wrote:
> >> Why not use in-browser offline storage?
> >> http://www.html5rocks.com/en/features/storage
> > One of my favorite articles:
> > http://alistapart.com/article/application-cache-is-a-douchebag
>
> On 2014-08-16, 5:15 PM, svetlana wrote:
> > ...
> > That is OK, you and Yuvi Panda highlighted some important points.
> > Thanks to both - I'll follow-up if I find solution to the application cache issues raised in the blog post linked earlier.
> >
> > svetlana
>
> Issues? The article is one of my favourites too, if you read through the
> whole thing it describes a technique of combining appcache,
> localStorage, and an iframe to make it possible for a site like
> Wikipedia to be made to work offline. And localStorage could even be
> substituted for IndexedDB (with a polyfill for WebSQL only browsers).
>
> ~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://danielfriesen.name/]
>
Could someone please tell me why I'm getting two different threads with this subject in my inbox? I have trouble following.
Thought that your point is that offline storage in browser is hard, and that's /why/ mobile apps exist. It's really hard to discuss this by email.
svetlana
We did another round of guerrilla testing for VE on mobile today. Overall
it was much improved from the last tests!
Especially these changes: X icon to back icon, arrow icon to word "next",
save page updates, and the switch between edit modes.
Here are those findings:
- Used back button and it did what they expected
- Hesitated when asked to save but all were able to find "Next" button
- Filled out the save screen appropriately, although 1 person said it
looked like an error screen at first
- When asked to switch to wikitext, tapped gear icon almost immediately,
but several people still struggled with "edit" and "edit source" language.
Everyone also struggled with the pop-up asking them to save before
switching.
But the link and reference context bars really failed the user tests.
:( Most did not notice that the icon in the toolbar was highlighted. Nobody
even noticed the context bars, and didn't know what they meant when I
pointed to them.
More notes
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Design/Research/VE_on_mobile#July_30.2C_2014…
I would suggest we try adding blue links that say "edit link" and "edit
citation" in those context bars, to show a user what they'll be doing
specifically. The taller height will also make the bar more noticeable.
Then we can test again!
Thanks,
Kaity